Next: Data Containers, Previous: Numeric Data Types [Contents][Index]

## 5 Strings

A string constant consists of a sequence of characters enclosed in either double-quote or single-quote marks. For example, both of the following expressions

    "parrot"
    'parrot'

represent the string whose contents are ‘`parrot`’. Strings in Octave can be of any length.

Since the single-quote mark is also used for the transpose operator (see Arithmetic Operators) but double-quote marks have no other purpose in Octave, it is best to use double-quote marks to denote strings.

Strings can be concatenated using the notation for defining matrices. For example, the expression

    [ "foo" , "bar" , "baz" ]

produces the string whose contents are ‘`foobarbaz`’. See Numeric Data Types, for more information about creating matrices.

While strings can in principle store arbitrary content, most functions expect them to be UTF-8 encoded Unicode strings.

Furthermore, it is possible to create a string without actually writing a text. The function `blanks` creates a string of a given length consisting only of blank characters (ASCII code 32).

: blanks (n) ¶

  Return a string of n blanks.

  For example:

      blanks (10);
      whos ans
           ⇒
            Attr Name        Size                     Bytes  Class
            ==== ====        ====                     =====  =====
                 ans         1x10                        10  char

  See also: repmat.